It takes more than just ergonomic furniture and a fitness center to achieve wellbeing at work. It’s about creating a culture of wellbeing where people can move, think and feel better.
With health issues like heart disease and obesity on the rise, it’s important for employers to look for ways to help their people be as healthy as possible- physically, cognitively and emotionally.
The rise of ergonomics in the 1980s helped us improve our understanding of biomechanics and the importance of providing posture support. But the workplace has evolved a lot since then and people are no longer spending all their time sitting at their desk. As mobile technology became more common, new research emerged supporting the importance of movement and providing multiple postures.
Today, work is more complex than ever. And most workplaces are full of distractions. People need access to spaces where they can focus and escape from the cognitive overload they face every day. They also need a more human-focused workplace where they feel great about their work and about their company. And employers need to take an active role in evaluating how their environment promotes wellness and wellbeing at work.
AN ASSAULT ON WELLBEING
Organizations have strong reasons to be preoccupied with physical wellness, given its clear connection to costs. Worldwide, rates of heart and lung disease, diabetes and obesity are rising sharply. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) found Mexico has a 32.8% adult obesity rate, surpassing the U.S. at 31.8%. There are now about 1.5 billion overweight people in the world, and at least 25% of them are in China, according to the Duke University Global Health Institute. In Mexico, Type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of adult deaths, says a 2011 study by the World Economic Forum and Harvard School of Public Health.
“The most successful organizations are now turning their attention to employee wellbeing as a way to gain emotional, financial and competitive advantage.”
At the same time that declining physical health poses a growing risk for employers, the ubiquity of technologies is driving people to multitask like never before, leading to cognitive overload. According to author, researcher and Harvard educator Shawn Achor, our senses receive 11M bits of information every second, but the conscious brain can effectively process only 40 bits of information. Switching from one task to another makes it difficult to tune out distractions and can cause mental blocks that reduce a person’s productive time by as much as 40%, according to research reported by the American Psychological Association.
In addition to cognitive costs, stress is a strong contributor to the explosion of “developed nation” diseases throughout the world. Rapid changes in the work people do, the tools and the technology they use have made work more complex, demanding and stressful. “How fast” and “how much” have taken on new dimensions, and work easily blends into life away from the workplace. These factors are all powerful catalysts for employee burnout and other signs of ill-being, making wellbeing a form of risk management.
In the United Kingdom, research by the Centre for Mental Health puts the costs of mental health-related presenteeism (at work physically but unproductive mentally) at £15 billion per year—almost twice the cost of absence. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work cites stress as a factor in at least half of all lost working days. Stress in the workplace is now emerging in the developing world, too, according to a 2011 report in Le Monde newspaper: “Countries from Asia and the southern hemisphere are now carefully—and officially—looking at the psycho-social problems and economic consequences linked to work-induced stress.” Courtesy: https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/topics/wellbeing/wellbeing-a-bottom-line-issue/